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Prosecuting police (March 20-June 14)
The failed effort to prosecute the killer of Lloyd Hobbs is not a topic addressed in any of the existing studies of the racial disorder in Harlem. In fact, the death of Lloyd Hobbs has rarely been mentioned. Thomas Kessner and Nicole Watson did recount McInerney killing the boy (both misidentifying him as Heineray following the mistaken transcription of his name in the Arno Press edition of the Final Report of the MCCH). Marilynn Johnson referred only to "the fatal shooting of a young looter" as one of the examples of police behavior that drew criticism at the MCCH hearings, ironically reproducing the mischaracterization of Hobbs that McInerney used to justify shooting him even as she highlighted critiques of the police. Recognizing the police violence that marked March 19 and 20 contributes to recasting those events to include interpersonal violence as part of the complex mix that characterized racial disorder. The sustained lack of accountability for that violence fed into Black residents' longstanding anger at the police department, helping it intensify and feed further racial disorder in subsequent years.
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- Thomas Kessner, Fiorello H. La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York (New York: McGraw Hill, 1989), 374.
- Nicole Watson, "The Harlem Riots, 1935, 1943, 1964," in Revolting New York: How 400 Years of Riot, Rebellion, Uprising, and Revolution Shaped a City, eds. Neil Smith and Don Mitchell (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018), 165.
- Shannon King, Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism During the New Negro Era (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 153-86.
- Marilynn S. Johnson, Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 188.